Winners From The First QuickTapSurvey Hackathon Of 2018

Hackathons are a valued part of QuickTapSurvey’s culture. They provide employees with the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across various departments, work on new projects, and show off their many talents and skills. Hackathons are also an opportunity for everyone to stop typical work assignments and dedicate their time to innovating creative and original projects in 24 hours.

As usual awards were given out in various categories:

Code Guru: Awarded to the team with a hack that has the most difficult and impressive code

Can’t Live Without it Award: Awarded to the team with the most useful hack

Innovation: Awarded to the team with the most creative or out of the box thinking hack

Sexiest Hack: Awarded to the team with the best looking hack

Everyone Loves it: Awarded to the team that has an all around great hack

Each year the competition at our Hackathon gets stiffer and stiffer as the hacks get better and better. This Hackathon did not disappoint. The innovation and creativity was outstanding and many individuals and teams developed quality hacks. Here are a look at our winners:

Code Guru Award: Rodrigo for NoTapSurvey

This code master based his hack on an open source tool made available by AWS team to create interactive adventure games running through Amazon’s Alexa. Rodrigo created logic to translate a survey structure into the corresponding interaction model, intents, and scenes used to build a skill that could run in an Amazon Echo device. No need to tap your responses to a survey, just let Alexa read them out loud, and give answers using your voice! This hack made data collection completely hands free.

Can’t Live Without it Award: Martin for Mass User Creation

Martin tackled a huge project by developing a way to create user accounts in a fraction of the time it used to take. Before this nifty hack each user had to be created individually one by one and required a custom username and password. This was a very time consuming and tedious project especially if there were many users. Martin was able to build an option that would allow a customer to upload a CSV file that defines the details of the users to be created. This hack allows hundreds of user accounts to be uploaded and validated in the system in a matter of seconds. Now instead of going through an extremely repetitive and time consuming task our customers can create users faster than they can create surveys.

Innovation Award: UW Coops for Paper Surveys to QuickTapSurveys

The group known only as the collective bunch, UW Coops, came up with the most innovative hack from the day. Using Google’s Text Recognition API the UW Coops created an Android App that was able to scan a paper survey using a phone or tablet camera. From there the UW Coops modified the backend of QuickTapSurvey to request to the server to create a survey without actually opening the web app. This allowed the UW Coops to go straight to the mobile app to find a new survey that they scanned from a paper seconds earlier. Basically it expedites survey creation by scanning old paper surveys and uploading the QuickTapSurvey version right to your mobile device.

In his inaugural QuickTapSurvey Hackathon, Franko won not only the Sexiest Hack award but the Everyone Loves It Award as well, for his improvement to the skip logic feature on the QuickTapSurvey platform. Franko noticed that well basic skip logic has an approachable learning curve, the complex skip logic is difficult to grasp for the everyday user due to its resemblance of writing code. He also noticed that unless you are testing all the skip logic in a draft survey there is no real way to know if it is working which can be challenging if a survey is long. To tackle these issues Franko made it is easier for users to utilize skip logic by creating drop down menus and buttons compared to the code required before. He also allowed users to simulate the questions that the survey-taker would see by toggling the skip logic on/off. Overall, Franko created a very useful hack that will help our users get the survey design they desire.